The group, which was composed of businessmen, journalists, academics, and former elected officials, advanced the position that "common sense" should determine U.S. trade policy with the USSR, specifically, that the U.S. should avoid economic boycotts and sanctions against the Soviet Union as such measures rarely worked.

It also supported the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), increased scientific and cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union, and less confrontational rhetoric about the USSR.

[1][2][3] According to the committee, its underlying perspective was support for the "resolute abandonment of the stale slogans and reflexes of the Cold War ... and a determination not to be governed by the compulsions of military competition".

[4] One of the committee's earliest activities was production of the film Survival ... or Suicide which presented a cinematic treatment of the effects nuclear war would have on daily life.

The impetus for re-forming the committee was, according to its executive editor James Carden, due to its perception that "anyone who has had the temerity to question whether NATO’s relentless expansion eastward to Russia’s borders has contributed to the crisis [in Ukraine], can look forward to being labeled a 'useful idiot', a 'dupe', or a 'Kremlin apologist'.